"I just realized, 'This girl is really cute!' so I just went up to her and said, 'Are you single?'" Carter, 21, tells Us. "I'm going to leave it at that for now. I'm just going to put it out there and see what happens."

His partner Smirnoff, 30, has the tendency to go after men on the ballroom (ahem, Mario Lopez and Maksim Chmerkovskiy), but she says rumors that she wants Carter are "ridiculous."